Thursday, September 25, 2014

Apple Baked Oatmeal

In August, when I was on a little vacation, I had a lovely
baked oatmeal dish for breakfast one day. It was exactly what I hoped it would
be and exactly what I wanted for breakfast. I decided it was exactly what I was
hoping to be able to make at home.

Well, I didn’t really get a chance to search too hard for a
recipe after that, but then I was reading through a copy of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook by Amy Traverso, and found one that looked like what I needed. I finally got a chance
to try it out on a lazy Saturday morning, and it was delicious! Still exactly
what I want for breakfast!

While I went through all the steps of the recipe on the
morning I was going to eat it, I think you could do some of the prep work ahead
of time to get breakfast on the table a little faster (although this does need
to bake for about an hour.) I think you could mix up the dry ingredients, and
cover and store them at room temperature, then mix up the wet ingredients and
store them in the refrigerator. The next day, while the oven is preheating, you
could cut up the apple, mix the wet and dry ingredients together, mix in the
apple, pour into your pan and bake.

I used Cortland apples in this dish, a type with which I’ve
had mixed results when baking. This time, they kept their shape and much of
their firmness, which I didn’t mind. You could use whatever apple you like to
bake with, and if it is an apple that cooks down to a softer texture, you would
probably get a baked oatmeal that is moister than what I got. The texture of
mine was almost cake-like, which, again, I didn’t mind.

This dish isn’t especially sweet, but you could add maple
syrup or more brown sugar to your serving if you’d like. My husband threw
himself on a second serving to test this concept with maple syrup and gave it
the thumbs-up. You could also use different nuts and dried fruits (or none). I
quite liked the dried cranberries and walnuts with the apples and cinnamon. I
also quite liked that this makes a full 8-inch square baking dish full of
breakfast and the leftovers were also great warmed up for a few days after the
original baking day. No effort on weekday mornings: now, that’s exactly what I
want for breakfast!